YES! Finally it’s October and Halloween is upon us! Woohooooooooooooooooooo!
Now, I don’t know about you but Halloween is one of my favourite holidays to celebrate
inside the classroom (and outside too!).
I love EVERYTHING about this festive period! The atmosphere, the excitement, the smells, the candy, the dressing up and the excuse to be creative and have fun with our school kids!
I always decorate my classroom the week of Halloween and the children absolutely love it. Here in Spain, Halloween isn’t as celebrated as it is in the USA or UK so for a school to be decorated is a big thing for my kiddos. They look forward to it every single year! And believe it or not, it’s not just the kids. Why just the other day a 15 year old student, who I’ve taught for many years, said to me ‘ Amy, it’s October 1st tomorrow. Oh, that means you will decorate the school! I love coming to class when it’s all spooky.’ I also always dress up and paint my face too. Bringing the whole experience of Halloween together in my class.
So of course, over the years I have done a lot and I mean a LOT of different crafts and activities with my groups and today I’m sharing them with you, so you can share the spirit of Halloween with your kids too! Let’s have a looooooooooooook!
Hand paint art
Starting off nice and easy. Parents love having hand paint art to look back on as a nice memory of their children. This Halloween craft is easy to do and so it is great for preschool / kindergarten age. It’s a bit messy so I recommend having some wipes nearby, but the kids love the feeling of the paint on their hands so it’s worth it!
I also like to connect this craft with emotions for my younger ESL ones. We normally make a happy ghost, an angry zombie and a silly pumpkin. Others to try could be a scary spider, a surprised witch and a nervous Frankenstein giving a wide variety of vocabulary and Halloween characters.
Group pumpkin motor skills activity
This activity is for younger children and is completed as a group or several small groups. You will need to prepare the pumpkins before the class and put them up on the wall. I use this activity for emotions and so we do a couple of different ones such as happy, sad, angry and scary. Students have a sheet of stickers and using the mouth template, they follow the line with the stickers. This is great for fine motor skills too and the kids love it as it’s active and creative, plus which kid doesn’t like using stickers!!
Follow up game - Call out the emotion of the pumpkin and students run to that one. Quick, fun and active. Also great for listening and vocabulary skills.
Dancing Skeletons
Better for primary and first school, this craft is perfect to go with the funny bones books (which if you haven’t read then you are missing out! Check them out here: The funny bones collection ES or The funny bones collection USA * Disclaimer :I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission. Thanks ) and there are also fun skeleton songs on YouTube too. My favourite is this one from Super Simple songs The Skeleton Dance
For my ESL classes I also pair this with parts of the body vocabulary and we usually label the picture too.
This craft is effective because it looks difficult but is actually easy to put together. Using cotton buds and glue to create the body and paper to cut and draw the skull. I recommend starting with the ribs and back bone first, so you can plan where the other body parts are going.
Ghosts on a pumpkin
I use this for my first / primary age students, who want to use hand prints but would prefer to cut them out rather than paint the hands. Very easy to complete, doesn’t use a lot of material and has a cool 3D effect from curling up the fingers to create the ghost. My students enjoy making this because everyone’s results are all a little different. They can make the pumpkin big, or small and the ghost can be happy, or scary. It’s creative, individual and fun!
Vampire folded book marks
One for the older students now. These bookmarks are fun, creative and interesting to make! How do you do it you ask? Just follow the step by step video! Easy as that.
Halloween paper cup game!
My students LOVE this game and would honestly play it for hours and hours if they were given the chance! Now, I personally made this game for them to play in small groups or for maths centres (they have to add up the points) but if you have many groups or especially for older kids you could let them draw and create the characters for the cups. This would make it a bigger project to complete and would also take more time.
How to play
Each cup needs to have a Halloween character drawn on the front and a number written on the back. You stack them up into a pyramid, and children have 2 balls to throw at the tower, with the objective being to knock down as many as possible. Any cups still standing don’t count! Then students add up the points from the cups knocked down and record it on a sheet of paper or the class board. After 3 turns each (or however many you have time for) They add up the points and the person with the highest score wins.
Even my big kids (teens) love playing this game and ask for it every year!
For the teacher, it’s cheap to set up, and it’s reusable year after year, plus it’s fun to play too!
And there we have it ghouls and ghosts. Some of my favourite activities for Halloween to do in the classroom. What about you? Do you dress up? Do you have any great go to games or crafts? I’m always looking for new things to try out in my class, so please do give me a shout out below and let me know how you do Halloween in your part of the world.
And above all,
Yorumlar